May 24, 2004, Monday

By BARRY MEIER and MARTIN GOTTLIEB; Abeer Allam contributed reporting from Egypt for this article and Alison Langley from Switzerland

The past is everywhere in the Upper Egypt city of Akhmim, and mining it is a constant occupation. At a government archaeological site, workers haul bucketfuls of soil and sand from a vast crease in the earth, gradually revealing a mammoth temp...

February 23, 2004, Monday

When the lights went out on Thursday, Imani Kuumba was in an eyeglass shop on 116th Street in Harlem. She was also in a very different New York from the one she lived in when the last major blackout in 1977 turned her South Bronx neighborhood into...

August 17, 2003, Sunday

There was, before yesterday, the good blackout and the bad blackout: the 15-hour power loss beginning on the evening of Nov. 9, 1965, that was largely characterized by cooperation and overriding good cheer and the 25-hour one beginning on the stic...

August 15, 2003, Friday

Almost lost in the sumptuous display of Mesopotamian antiquities in the ''Art of the First Cities'' exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum is a small limestone fragment, triangular in shape and delicately carved. The piece shows Naram-Sin, ...

August 2, 2003, Saturday

Significant archaeological sites have been looted of tens of thousands of objects since the beginning of the war in Iraq, although some of the most famous sites have escaped unscathed, American archaeologists who surveyed the country last month re...

June 12, 2003, Thursday

Attorney General John Ashcroft, meeting today with law enforcement experts at the Interpol offices here, pledged vigorous United States support for efforts to recover artworks looted from Iraqi museums and ''to return to the people of Iraq their c...

May 7, 2003, Wednesday

After a rampage of looting of museums in Iraq in the wake of the Persian Gulf war of 1991, American and British archaeologists compiled a list of more than 2,000 stolen objects, a sad catalog of losses to the history of civilization. Eleven years ...

May 1, 2003, Thursday

Representatives of many of the world's great museums gathered amid the ancient artifacts of the British Museum today to announce a campaign to rebuild as much as possible the plundered cultural institutions of Iraq. Experts from the Louvre in P...